Wordless Wednesday: Libya's Intimate in the Remote
"... [A] sense of time enough to let thought and feeling range from here to the end of the world and back; the discovery of something intimate -- though impossible to name -- in the remote."
That was how Edward Abbey, the great naturalist and author of Desert Solitaire, described the soul-embracing emptiness of Arches National Monument in Utah (before the place became a national park and was overrun by "police, administrators, paved highways, automobile nature trails, official scenic viewpoints, designated campgrounds, Laundromats, cafeterias, Coke machines, flush toilets and admission fees.")
Looking at that equally soul-embracing photograph by French photographer David Rombaut, taken in Libya's Akakus Desert, I'm struck by the same discovery of something intimate, impossible to name.
"Alone in the silence," I read on, the voice of Abbey in my ears, "I understand for a moment the dread which many feel in the presence of primeval desert, the unconscious fear which compels them to tame, alter or destroy what they cannot understand, to reduce the wild and prehuman to human dimensions. Anything rather than confront directly the ante-human, that other world which frightens not through danger or hostility but in something far worse -- its implacable indifference."
And what beauty that indifference can convey.
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Comments
This photo is gorgeous, Pierre! Thank you for posting it.